Thread

Relays are nothing but servers that store your data, text and media. There are many players, most are "free" for the user not for the ones who run the relay, it is not that expensive but is not free, the more data hosting the more expensive. Few rules to make it easier: 1. Try to keep it under 10 relays, each additional relay you add increases the data and storage consumption of your mobile. 2. Use popular relays, I believe looking at your profile you are in Primal, in settings you can edit the relays, these are popular ones: wss://relay.damus.io/ wss://nos.lol/ wss://relay.0xchat.com/ wss://relay.nostr.band/ wss://nostr.mom/ 3. Paid relays are used to have a censorship factor into the experience, meaning, the service will filter out what in the terms of service is considered "non desirable content" like nudity, porn, violence, etc. You can do that yourself as well by simply blocking all users that post these type of content, in the case of Primal they do a decent job out of the box blocking most of that sort of content either way. Having your own relay like Citric is advantageous as well since you can back up your data, relays can purge data at will... 4. An additional service that is paid and more interesting than paid relays is paid storage, meaning, you have more media upload limit by setting a paid media server and your data is stored while you paid in their relays as part of the service. Most users are fine with the free tear, but if you are an artist, creator of content or influencer you may consider the nostr.band service to store content and a paid relay for backup of your data as a good measure. Hope this helps

In think her question was also about why two clients show a different set of relays, i.e., one only uses a locally stored set vs. another might use a global set. This is not very clear to most people, even long-time users.

Some clients like Amethyst are quite polish on security and relays organization, thus, in Amethyst you can choose relays for inbox, outbox, searches, private storage, local relay and general, in others much less polish is a pool of few relays by default (assume partners and possible metadata deals with "no personal information", you know like Facebook does... just my opinion). In Primal a default general set is there, but you can add and remove at will, but only general relays, in addition it offers you the possibility to use their catching service, thus, you share your IP only with Primal... I like more Amethyst full TOR Privacy , no IP address sharing with no one. And if a primal fan, use Orbot using the apps options in the background and route Primal throughout TOR. So even the IP address shared with Primal using their catching service will be masked. In summary, every client is different and offers more or less features related to relays.

Thanks, I think I have those relays, maybe on Primal or Damus, maybe YakiHonne, I gotta learn more of the how and thanks for responding

That too!!

Wow!!